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I think they might be a little optimistic or misleading, while it might run on a machine of the specifications above, I think anyone trying it will be bitterly disappointed. My experience with XP is that is is fairly resource hungry and really loves 512mb RAM or more - I gave it the flick and went back to Windows 2000 on one of my desktops, best move I made.

You may want to consider Windows 2000 if you can, just as good as XP in my opinion, just not dressed in the fancy clothes. I have friends running W2K on 256mb RAM machines flawlessy after having similar problems with XP.

Check for spyware as suggested, but also when the computer is running slow do a Ctrl-Alt-Del and have a look at Processes in Task Manager - you may see what is chewing up the resources that could be causing the slowing of the machine. This may help find and remedy the problem, and if the budget extends that far, throw in some more RAM - your Windows machine will love you for it

A lot of this depends on what you are using your PC for.
Games?? Server ?? Unusual applications ??

In any case WinXP with 256Mb is very marginal - I'd say 512Mb is the minimum required.
IMHO you should fit an extra 256Mb (or more) of RAM ASAP, as your system is going to struggle anyway.

Probably irrelevant, but I presume the reason you have 224Mb of memory, is that you have a really crappy graphics card (probably on the motherboard) which is using 32Mb of your main RAM - will not deliver on most games released over the last two years or so.

In reply to reset_button : on my PC at home I upgraded from Win98 (256Mb RAM) to WinXP (512Mb RAM), and WinXP is completely stable.

Didn't make any difference for serious applications like IE, Word, Excel etc., but I was very surprised that it hasn't crashed once in the last year playing games or anything else. Something that used to happen from time to time with Win98 ... I leave it switched on all the time, except to reboot to apply critical fixes, new hardware etc.

So to me the moral of the story is give WinXP enough RAM, and it is likely to extremely stable, although it does need more RAM than Win2K or WinNT. And RAM is very cheap at the moment!

XP and a Minimalist Machine

Running one machine at home with a 333MHz PII and 256 MB. Happy but pretty slow. Mainly used for email by a non-computer-literate person and is stable and satisfactory to them. It really is ok for simple stuff, although for most of us here a lot more horsepower is needed.

If you have any new virii or spyware, those two will take care of it.
If you have realone player installed, uninstall it. If you have AIM installed, make sure that the little taskbar isn't always on. Turn off Microsoft Office's toolbar. And like someone already said, go to Start -> Run -> and type msconfig. Go to the last tab and uncheck programs that you know shouldn't be starting up and runnig in the background (not associated with Windows) Example: Music Match has a program called mmtask that runs in the background...if you have Music Match uninstall it to. For a list of good applications that will consume very little resources, post a thread and we will all have a very good time telling you a few.

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand,
nor look through the eyes of the dead...You shall listen to all
sides and filter them for your self.
-Walt Whitman-

what's so bad about XP? I have another computer wich is a clone of this one, and it works fine. and I dont want to format since I've have bad problems with that and might get killed by someone "unknown" Well I guess It's my only choice though. thanks

i run a p4 1.5ghz with suse it works flawlessly...i would say that your biggest problem would be windows

no that i got that out of the way i would have to agree about xp being hungry for ram if you really want to run it you should just upgrade to at least 512mb ram. Another reason your computer may be slow is you may need to make a larger cache partition on your drive. try partition magic im pretty sure it free to try at least

Another possible cause

The following link discusses a problem with XP sp1 system slowdowns. You did not state if you applied any patches to your new system. This only article describes problems related to those who applied XP sp1.

Windows does not use a cache partition. It uses a page file that can be adjusted without using partitioning utilities as it is simply a file on your root file system. Please make sure that the information you are giving out is valid as some people may not know that what you are telling them is incorrect.